Wikipedia Reaches Three Millionth Article Milestone

Online knowledge database Wikipedia has announced that it has reached the three million articles mark, more than 8 years after it was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.

The site, who's ranked amongst the ten biggest websites in the world, said that its three millionth English language article was about that Norwegian actress and film director Beate Eriksen and was reached on Monday, 17 August 2009.

Overall, the Wikipedia organisation has more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages; it also has more than 10 million registered users who have created in excess of 17 million pages and made on average 32 edits each on the English version.

The German version is the second biggest version with more than 943,000 articles followed by French, Polish and Chinese. The site routinely ranks on top of Google search results pages for popular terms and often just after official websites of companies like Google or Microsoft.

In addition Wikimedia Commons, the sister website to Wikipedia which houses images and videos for the Wikimedia Foundattion, said that it would be reaching its five millionth file by the end of this month.

The future appears rosy with more than $6 million worth of donations being raised in the last appeal for health; furthermore, $890,000 being earmarked to rehaul Wikimedia's design completely in a bid to make it more up to date; prototypes can be found here.

Our Comments

The first millionth English-language article was reached back in September 2004 and on average 1,300 articles are added daily, although this is a significant decrease from the 2,200 or so articles that were added every day back in July 2007. Because of its open nature, Wikipedia has been manipulated many time and its objectivity questioned several times.